An Egyptian police band, the grandly named Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, in 1996 is supposed to play at an Arab cultural center in Israel, but gets the town‘s name wrong at the bus station and ends up in an Israeli backwater.
Haled (Ari‘el Stachel), a trumpet player who loves Chet Baker, sings “My funny valentine” to female soldiers at the bus station. But the diversion plus imperfect English turns Petah Tikva, the city with the Arab cultural center, into Bet Hatikva. And so hangs the tale, and a charming, moving, slightly sentimental gem of a play.
I seem to be using the word a lot lately: hokey. Chandeliers with lit candles descend to sounds of operatic “ah ah” and pretentious violins. The story is based on a French epistolary novel written in 1782, and meant as a satire. But with the direction by Josie Rourke, you get the feeling that audiences are invited to enjoy the sex stuff. It‘s basically about a guy putting notches on his bedpost. (“Sex in the 18th-century French City”?)
The anti-hero Valmont (Lev Schreiber) is conspicuously charming. His former lover the Marquise, played by a take-no-prisoners Janet McTeer, wants revenge against her former lover Jacour, who has announced that he is going to marry a rich young girl. And Valmont wants to seduce married women known for their high morals.
It‘s light fluff, but if you love 40s music, as I do, just forget the silly plot. Besides, the production and the actors are charming. And there is 40s scat. Also jazzy music, dance kicks, swing and tap. The show is based on a 1942 movie, but a lot of the songs have been added.
Simon McBurney, founder and artistic director of the British theater company Complicite (a French word here pretentiously spelled without the acute accent on the e) has produced a hokey often loopy and generally pompous conceit under the pretext of an anthropological mission to the Amazon.
He pretends to be the photographer Loren McIntyre in 1969. But the visual, as it would appear to an audience viewing the stage, is not enough. You get earphones to enjoy surround sound and sense that you are partaking of McIntyre‘s adventures and dangers. Something blows in your ear, a noise comes from behind and you want to turn. You hear the crashes and echoes of the jungle. Think radio show sound effects.
Dec 2, 2016 – Today, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton banned me from attending a talk by William Browder, a controversial American-born investor whose undocumented stories about the theft of several of his Russian companies and the death of his accountant have led to a ban in the U.S. (2012) against people he has accused — again without proven evidence — of human rights abuses and the theft of those companies. The result has been to damage relations between Russia and the U.S.
When can it be more relevant to look at the politics of theater? In this year of bizarre reaction, “Fiddler” continues to be the quintessential representation of popular struggle. This is a brilliant production by Bartlett Sherr. Lucky to see it with Danny Bernstein and Jessica Hecht, major actors of our time. They are supported by an excellent ensemble cast. In Russia of the early 1900s, a Jewish community in Russia is confronting the challenges of social modernization and the political threat of the Czar.
Nov 20, 2016 – My neighborhood: Sunday night, and the meeting room of a community center on West 13th Street in the Village was jammed with hundreds of people, standing room only, all quite passionately opposed to what President-elect Donald Trump threatens to do to the country – especially hurting various identity groups and entrenching extremists in a space for the newly powerful to which (nobody mentioned it) the Clintons and Obama had opened the door, put in plush rugs, etc.
Is David Hare‘s play “Plenty” about the personal or the political? A confusing muddle.
We first see our heroine Susan (the very fine Rachel Weisz) at 17 in occupied France where her job is to work with other resistance fighters to divert Germans from the front. In a black cap and trench coat, she is waiting for a drop. But an unexpected “drop” is Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett), a British pilot who has bailed out. She weeps to him about how she is replacing an agent who was captured and taken to Buchenwald. Then the war ends.
This is not a children‘s game. It is a riveting, compelling, inventive dissection of slavery, the underground railroad, the civil war and racism. In fact, “riveting, compelling, inventive” is a good description of Ars Nova, which presents this play and also created “The Great Comet of 1812” just opening on Broadway.
The Underground Railroad Game comes out of the experience of Scott Sheppard, one of the two creator/performers, who in the 5th grade participated in a unit about the civil war that divided students into Union and Confederate soldiers. But this is much more. And definitely not for 5th graders. If the underground railroad gives people the sense of, “at least there was a silver lining” to slavery, this production puts the real story out, with in-your-face realism. Taibi Magar‘s powerful direction is bereft of illusions.
The protagonists sometimes scowl, smirk, sneer, scream, run with branches to represent a forest, are pushed around on roller chairs, pass through moving doorways that reflect entrances and exits, and occasionally face inches away from first-row audiences to pull them into the plot. Not quite Bedlam but you get the very idea from this troupe that believes in “the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience…collapsing aesthetic distance…[in] a kinetic experience of shared empathy.”
There were 70 singers telling stories to music, swinging to jazz beats, crooning emotion and trilling high notes at the annual Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Convention. In four days at the Rose Theatre, dedicated by Lincoln Center to jazz, you could hear performers as young as 15 and as old as 88 present stunning new and veteran talents – in fact, the special thing about cabaret is that it has no age limits.
Peter Brook‘s “Battlefield” is an elegant, moving and sad parable about justice and war, life and death, going back in our sophisticated times to the simple way earlier societies said these truths. It is inspired by the “The Mahabarata,” a stylized ritualistic vision of war from the epic Sanskrit poem dating from 400 B.C. which director Peter Brook staged in a 9-hour performance in 1987.
Sept 29, 2016 – Tony Blair was in town for the opening of the United Nations, which draws heads of state, foreign ministers, and people who think they ought to travel in those circles. Former British Prime Minister Blair was one of the latter. One of the architects of the Iraq War, he came to attempt to reinvent himself as a humanitarian. He has set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to work with education programs to deal with extremism across the world. To help stop it. (Do you know the meaning of chutzpah?) He has also reinvented himself as a very rich guy, selling his services to various Gulf sheiks and the president-for-life of Kazakhstan.
Blair had the help of the Council on Foreign Relations, which helped his PR offensive by pairing him in a meeting with UNESCO head Irina Bokova to discuss “the role of education and civil society in preventing global extremism and raising awareness among governments.” It was a surreal event, not likely to change any
I hadn’t been to Lisbon for decades, not since a few years after the Revolution of the Carnations in 1974 when the military overthrew the dictator, Antonio Salazar. Happy people in the streets stuck those flowers in the muzzles of solders‘ rifles and on their uniforms, and so the revolution – which turned democratic — got its name. It was glorious to visit again, and experience Portugal‘s well-deserved reputation for charming, warm and friendly people. But for many American travelers, Portugal is not on their list. It should be.
The oldest demarcated wine region in the world in not in France. It is in Portugal, in the Douro region near Porto, famous for port wine, and a necessary stop on any traveler‘s tour of the country. Though the vineyards are an hour-and-a-half distant and more, the cellars are in Vila Nova de Gaia, just across the river from Porto. There, port wine companies have set up tours and tastings, and we spent a happy few hours there under the tutelage of Taylor Port‘s Claire Aukett.
In a velvet ankle-length gown, white gloves and white fur stole, the signature gardenia over one ear, Bonita Brisker glitters like the rhinestones on her costume. “What a little moonlight will do…” she channels Billie Holiday, her songs, her life. “Greetings FBI” to the government thugs who harassed her. She reminds the audience that she “cut a man for putting hands on me wrong.” And Count Basie fired her. And then, “Them their eyes!” It‘s a masterful performance that brings Billie to life.
Of the plays I saw during six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, these plays about justice stood out: “A Common Man: The Bridge that Tom Built,” “The Red Shed,” “Playing Maggie,” and “Undermined.”
The first play is about Thomas Paine, who fought for liberty in colonial America, was forced out for his politics, and spent time in London and also as a member of the Convention in revolutionary France, before having to flee. His story is not well enough known in America. The other three, addressing issues in the Paine tradition, deal a few centuries later with British politics and particularly the miners‘ strike of 1984-5, which still reverberates in Brits’ psyches.
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are three about the people the system chews up: “Diary of a Madman,” “Trainspotting” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
The Fringe is not only about theater. There is also dance. Here are performances I found important. The classic Studies in Red, 3 girls 2 boys, twists, turns, high kicks and poses in excellent form was a highlight. This choreographers‘ showcase has been presented at the Fringe for 15 years, and it‘s a good chance to see an eclectic selection of creative dancers, ranging from traditional to minimal. In this case, the best were traditional!
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are two about the system‘s corruption: “The Trial” and “Enron.” It’s quite fascinating to see surreal plays about systemic corruption a century apart. Franz Kafka was ahead of his time in describing the nature of the evil of modern society. His 1915 story “The Trial,” adapted in Edinburgh as a play, shows the evil of a government bureaucracy that grinds up a banker for no particular reason. Then look at Lucy Prebble‘s “Enron,” still surreal, where the bureaucrats are now corporate officials, but are still presented, like the Kafka play, as if this were a weird vaudeville.
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are several about war and its fallout: Angel, Glasgow Girls and Hess.
The Americans had to be kept in the dark, out of the loop, not told anything about the secret Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians. Because the Americans’ big-power arrogance would derail them.
That is a provocative note in “Oslo,” J.T. Rogers‘ play about the back channel negotiations that led to a ground-breaking Israeli-PLO agreement signed at the Clinton White House in 1993. It would create the Palestinian Authority, with limited government over the West Bank and Gaza and agreement for both sides to continue negotiations.
